News for the Nanomecanics Group @ CRANN - The Naughton Institute, Trinity College Dublin

August 2022: Martin is invited to present our Sars-CoV2 research at the NMC 2022 in Bagalore, India organized by Akshay Naik
November 2021: Giulio Brunetti is sucessfully passing his PhD examination. External Examinor: Yves Dûfrène (UC Louvain, Belgium)
September 2021: Giulio is publishing the SARS-Cov2 diagnostic paper also with the back cover of the journal Nanoscale Advances
September 2021: Giulio Brunetti is submitting his PhD thesis on Nanotechnological Cantilever-based Analysis of infectious Disease Biomarkers
September - December 2021: Matthew Christie joins the Nanobio Group for his final year project on the topic of targeted functionalization and measurements of miRNA targets.
July 2021: Ireland under siege. Ireland is the only country in Europe that remains at COVID level 5 (highest alert) in Europe since December 2020 (7 months). International travel is restricted to essential travel since March 2020 (16 months)
May 2021: Giulio Brunetti presents his Malaria research paper online at the Bio-Nanomechanics Conference
May 2021: Annalisa De Pastina publishes her research paper on the performance and instrumental details of the Nanomechanical platforms in the journal Review of Scientific instruments. Quantitative limit of 1 pg mass sensitivity in bioliquids achieved (500x improvement over the last 10 years)
February 2021: Giulio Brunetti gets the Cover page of Malaria research paper in Nanoscale. Paper finally published in 'Nanoscale'
December 2020: Giulio Brunetti's Malaria Vaccine research manuscript is accepted in 'Nanoscale'
September-December 2020: Jack Bollard joins the Nanobio Group for his final year project on the topic of Nanomechanical measurements of Sars_CoV2 proteins and other ssDNA targets.
September 2020: Gender equality Athena Swan award conferred to School of Physics, Martin Hegner, Champion and Chair of SAT SoP
August-October 2020: Amy Monahan joins the Nanobio Group for her Laidlaw project on the topic of Nanomechanical Malaria Vaccine analysis.
March - May 2020: Research lock-down the Nanobio group can go back as essential workers in May 2020 Dublin, Ireland
February 2020: Martin attends the ICONICA 2020 conference at the Panjab University in Chandigarh as invited speaker in Chandigarh, India
October 2019: Martin attends the Bioinfomics conference in Cuba as invited speaker in Cayo Santa Maria, Cuba
October 2019: Chiara Rotella and Fabio Niosi leave the Nanobio group to Sicily and Fabio joins a company in Catania, Italy
September-December 2019: Vinod Jadhav joins the Nanobio Group for his final year project on the topic Covalent immobilization of long single DNA molecules for optical tweezers measurements in various liquids.
July 2019: Francesco Padovani leaves the Nanobio group and joins the Helmholtz Zentrum in Munich, Germany
June 2019: Annalisa De Pastina presents her work at the NMC 2019 workshop at EPFL in Switzerland
June 2019: Giulio Brunetti presents his work at the NMC 2019 workshop at EPFL in Switzerland
June 2019: Annlisa De Pastina joins the group to work on diagnostic cantilever array development
May 2019: Francesco publishes his work on blood heamostasis
May 2019: Fabio Niosi joins the group to work on diagnostic cantilever array development
May 2019: Chiara Rotella presents her work at the 4th International Congress on Biomaterials and Biosensors (BIOMATSEN) in Turkey
April 2019: MH invited speaker at BU Munich
April 2019: James Duffy leaves the Nanobio group and joins a research project in industry
November 2018: James Duffy successful PhD exam. External Examinor: Joseph Ndieyira (UCL, GB)
September 2018: James presents his work at the SEIA 2018 conference in Amsterdam
August 2018: Chiara Rotella joins the group to work on the canilever array technology development
July 2018: Francesco Padovani successful PhD exam. External Examinor: Silvan Schmid (University of Vienna, Austria)
June 2018: James publishes his paper on cancer and adverse drug effects direct miRNA diagnostics in serum in Nanoscale
June 2018: Martin attends the NMC2018 as invited speaker in Seoul, Korea
May 2018: Francesco presents his work at the Nanobiosurfaces conference in Lausanne at EPFL, Switzerland
April 2018: Martin invited speaker at Nanoscience institute in Ankara
March 2018: Victor Usov, leaves the group to join the school of Engineering, TCD
January 2018: We publish a paper on tip enhanced Raman spectroscopy in collaboration with ETH Zurich, Switzerland in Angewandte Chemie Intl. Ed.
December 2017: Francesco publishes his paper about Thrombosis diagnostics and monitoring of therapies in Nanoscale
November 2017: We get an ASCENT µFab Proposal in collaboration with Guillermo Villanueva of EPFL granted, to fabricate microcantilever arrays at the Tyndall Institute of Cork.
October 2017: Giulio Brunetti joins the group for his PhD
June 2017: New opening PhD: Project in microbial infections nanomechanical non-coding RNA detection. Start: October 2017 (see Positions)
May 2017: Paper on the real time analysis of the translation on single ribosomes with nanometer resolution is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA (PNAS).
April 2017: MH invited speaker at the NMC2017 in Kona, HI, USA
January 2017: Two new group members will join end of the month: Victor Usov and Mishan Britto.
December 2016: Paper on Microrheological Coagulation Assay is published in Analytical Chemistry
Oct 2016: Florian leaves the Nanobio group and joins the group of Sander Tans at the AMOLF institute in Amsterdam, The Netherlands
June 2016: MH invited speaker at the NMC2016 conference in Delft, The Netherlands
May 2016: MH is awarded a four year IvP grant by the Science Foundation Ireland
April 2016: Francesco Padovani successful PhD transfer
April 2016: James Duffy successful PhD transfer
February 2016: Paper on single molecule DNA-protein handles for nanomechanical investigations.
May 2016: MH is awarded a four year IvP grant (€1.01 M) by the Science Foundation Ireland
April 2016: Francesco Padovani successful PhD transfer
April 2016: James Duffy successful PhD transfer
January 2016: Samuel Grouse joins from DIT (Nanoscience) the Nanobio team for half a year for his practical internship in nanomechanical diagnostics
December 2015: Florian Wruck successfull PhD exam
November 2015: Vivek Jadhav leaves the Nanobiogroup and joins the North Eastern University, Boston USA
September-December 2015: Jeff McHugh joins the Nanobio Group for his final year project on the topic of quantitative nanomechanical measurements.
December 2014: Michael Walther leaves the Nanobio team and starts his Bicycle trip from Europe to South-East Asia.
December 2014: Michael Walther successful PhD exam
September 2014: Paul Fleming leaves the Nanobio Group and starts a new job at Accel Biotech, Inc.
July 2014: Francesco Padovani joins the group for a PhD thesis
July 2014: James Duffy joins the group for a PhD thesis
March 2014: Niall Maloney leaves the Nanobio team and starts a new job at DCU
March 2014: Gyöngyi Lukacs supports Horizon 2020 proposal writing and then starts a new job at BD-GenCell Biosystems
February 2014: Sinead Cullen leaves the Nanobio team and starts a new job at Life Science Recruitment
June 2013: Niall Maloney successful PhD exam
May 2013: Michael Walther represents the Nanobio team at the NMC2013 in Stanford USA
May 2013: Gyöngyi Lukacs leaves the Nanobio team
April 2013: Jason Jensen leaves the Nanobio team and starts as process engineer at Intel Ireland, a few years later he is awarded the Intel employee of the year by the development to exchange the inert gas hydrogen with nitrogen in µfab processes
April 2013: Florian's Wruck successful PhD transfer
April 2013: MH invited speaker at the Sample Prep conference in Cambridge, Boston
April 2013: MH appointed by Springer Science and Business Media as Editor-in-Chief for the EPJ Techniques and Instrumentation Journal, Co-editor-in Chief's: S.J. Buckman (ARC; Australian National University;
Canberra, Australia); P. Grütter (McGill University, Montreal, Canada)
April 2013: Kaspar Renggli returns to Switzerland after his visit for a collaborative research project on nanocontainers
March 2013: Niall Maloney represents the Nanobio team at the International Biodiagnostic conference in Barcelona
March 2013: Dorothea Bruggemann leaves the Nanobio team to take up an Assistant Prof position at the MPI in Stuttgart
February 2013: Florian Wruck visits collaborating lab in Paris
February 2013: Paul Fleming starts on the TIDA project to miniaturize the nanomechanical fluidics
December 2012: Technology Innovation Development Award (TIDA) Grant successful
December 2012: Jason Jensen is defending his PhD thesis with great success
December 2012: Martin being invited to join the 5th Bangalore Nano event as international speaker. This meeting of National importance showcases Nanoscience and Nanotechnology and is chaired by CNR Rao and sponsored by the government of Karnataka.
December 2012: Kaspar Renggli visits for a collaborative research project on nanocontainers
November 2012: SFI PI review
November 2012: CRANN's Industry Day, Minister of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation - Richard Bruton, TD visits the Nanobio Lab
November 2012: Peter Noy validated the newest device developed with the miRNA measurements from serum.
October 2012: Jason Jensen features on the front page of the international magazine GEN for our achievements in nucleic acids detection (see link)
October 2012: Niall Maloney wins the best Student Poster Prize at the Interface meeting in UCD - congratulations!
September 2012: Peter Noy from Hoffmann-la-Roche joins the group to perform validation measurements on the device which was developed at Hoffmann-la-Roche with the support of the nanomechanics group @ CRANN
September 2012: Sarah-Louise Ball joins us to work on the multiparameter diagnostic assay in the field of genomics and proteomics
September 2012: Christian Steinbring from University of Basel, joins us for the Master thesis in the field of 'single motor protein manipulation and spectroscopy'
June 2012: Rohit Mishra successful PhD defense, we celebrated in the Kennedy's. CONGRATULATIONS Rohit, Well Done!!!
March 2012: Vivek Jadhav joins the research group and will work on the single molecule force/fluorescence spectroscopy optical tweezers
February 2012: Ravi Joshi leaves the Nanobio team and starts a new job at Infineon
January 2012: Sinead Cullen (graduate from Cork and TCD) joins the group to work on the collaborative project on Thrombosis diagnostics which we pursue with BDI and St.James Hospital
December 2011: Several new papers have been published by the group
August 2011: Florian Wruck (graduate from DCU) joins the group to join the optical manipulation of biomolecules project
July 2011: Ravi Joshi, joins the group to continue on the graphene sensing project
July 2011: Ronan Daly leaves the group to join the ink-jet research group at Cambridge University, later is appointed as faculty @ Cambridge University
June 2011: Publication of collaborative project of successful mechanical experiments on nascent polypeptide chains translated by single ribosome is published in FEBS letters
May 2011: The Nanomechanics group hosted the NMC2011 conference in CRANN; see www.nmc2011.org
April 2011: Martin Hegner has been elected as Fellow of Trinity College Dublin
March 2011: PRTLI5 grant accepted. We join the 'Nanoremedies' project of UCD. 'Nanoremedies' : Nanomechanical Approaches and Functional Materials for Regenerative Medicine. We will design engineered functional biological structures and scaffolds to develop novel solutions for conventional implants and new strategies for regenerative medicine based on mechanically stimulated stem cell differentiation. This research program brings together an interdisciplinary team of scientists who work in the fields of nanomechanics and systems biology to identify the molecular mechanism(s) of nanomechanical transduction in cells.
January 2011: Ronan Daly is joining the research team and will develop micro-structured graphene based biological sensors
September 2010: The new CSET of the BDI at DCU is granted. We can start hiring of a new PhD student in a collaborative project on 'Miniaturised diagnostics for haemostasis and thrombosis' with Dr. T. Killard (BDI), Analog Devices Inc., Inverness medical diagnostic.
August 2010: Helene Gaussier leaves the group after 2 years for an assistant professor position at the Univ. Marseilles (France).
July 2010: Michael Walther (Uni Basel, Switzerland) joins the team to work on nanomechanical sensors for malaria diagnostic (in collaboration with the Swiss Tropical Institute, Basel, Switzerland)
July 2010: Dorothea Brueggemann (FZ Juelich, Germany) joins the team to work on single molecule studies on the ribosomal complex
June 2010: Dunja Skoko (NIH, Bethesda MD) joins the team to work on single molecule studies of the mitochondrial protein import machinery
March 2010: MH is awarded a five year PI grant (1.4MEuro) by the Science Foundation Ireland
October - December 2009: Mark Bell (TCD) and Meg McCann (TCD) join the team for a 3 month project work
October 2009: Johanna Konrad (Univ. Stuttgart) joins the team as an exchange student in the field of single molecule manipulation using optical tweezers
October 2009: Hoffmann-la-Roche is renewing the grant with the team of MH on nanomechanical detection of miRNA
September 2009: Wifried Grange leaves the group after 9 years for an assistant professor position at the Univ. Paris VI, Inst. J. Monod.
July - September 2009: Patrick O'Rourke (TCD) joins the team as summer student
April 2009: Niall Maloney (TCD) joins the team as a PhD student to work on the fast nanomechanical detection system for viable microorganisms (in collaboration with Novartis Ltd.).
March 2009: Gyöngi Lukacs (Univ. Szeged, Hungary) )joins the team to work on the fast nanomechanical detection system for viable microorganisms (in collaboration with Novartis Ltd.).
February 2009: Matteo D'Andrea (Univ. Torino) joins the team for five months to collaborate with Rohit Mishra in the field of PNA/RNA detection
January 2009: Margherita Farina (Univ. Parma) joins the team for her six month master thesis project (collaboration with G.P. Zuccheri)
January 2009: CRANN is awarded a CSET grant. MH is pursuing the development of a fast nanomechanical detection system for viable microorganisms within the CSET projects in collaboration with Novartis Ltd.
October 2008: Jason Jensen (TCD) starts his PhD in the field of quantitative nanomechanical protein sensing.
October - December 2008: Leo Dawson (TCD) is joining the team for his last year project in the field of single molecule manipulation.
October 2008: MH is awarded an industrial collaboration grant from Hoffmann-la-Roche to pursue the previous collaboration in the field of nanomechnical detection of genomic transcripts.
September 2008: Thomas Braun leaves CRANN for a position at the ETH Basel, Switzerland.
August 2008: Helene Gaussier (Univ. Washington, Seattle) is joining the team to work on the single molecule studies on mitochondrial protein import machinery.
August - November 2008: Kaspar Renggli (UniBasel) is joining the team as nanoscience project student.
July - October 2008: Nanoscience exchange student Michael Walther (Nanoscience curriculum, UniBasel) joins the group for a 3 month project.
February 2008: Nanoscience exchange student Adrian Renfer (UniBasel) joins the group for a 3 month project work.
January 2008: Manuel Vögtli starts a PhD thesis at the Nanocenter of University College London.
December 2007: Rohit Mishra (Univ. Halle) starts his PhD thesis in the field of nanomechanical DNA sensing (in collaboration with Hoffmann-la-Roche, Basel, Switzerland).
November 2007: Nanoscience exchange student Peter Noy (UniBasel) is joining the group for a six month Masters Project.
October 2007: We moved into CRANN as the first research team in the brand new research building. After waiting a week in the docklands at custom we can start unloading our 'lab' which was shipped in a truck and a trailer from University of Basel. Team members: Dr. Thomas Baun, Dr. Wilfried Grange, Manuel Vögtli (all from Univ. Basel).